blogger2004.gifThree or four years ago I set up an account with Blog­ger. Ini­tially it was used to main­tain news updates at a younger ver­sion of kartooner.com. When­ever I’d find a tid­bit from the vast archive of the web I’d write about it with Blogger.

At the time I used an ‘iframe’ to incor­po­rate Blogger’s blog*spot into my site. This was before Pyra Labs used ban­ner ads and it didn’t look as obstru­sive as it does today. Even­tu­ally I out­grew Blog­ger so to speak and con­tacted Six Apart to install Mov­able­type. Prior to this I had heard good things about Mov­able­type and it was either MT or Grey­mat­ter, which had fallen by the way­side due to lack of features.

I paid Ben Trott (sec­ond half of the Trott over­lords) 20 bucks and he installed it in about 24 hours time. I remem­ber feel­ing a sense of accom­plish­ment that I was now using a CMS, flaunt­ing it to my wife, who, under­stand­ably could care less. She was just happy I had some­thing to write my thoughts with, so to speak and all was well.

When I switched hosts I remem­ber the feel­ing of dread, think­ing; “Oh no, I can’t shell out another 20 bucks for MT. What to do?” and so after a few Google searches I learned how to CHMOD (or change mode prop­er­ties) on files via either FTP or a Linux/Telnet client. With my new­found power of CHMOD I stud­ied the Mov­able Type instal­la­tion doc­u­men­ta­tion and taught myself how to get it to work.

Since that point I’ve had great suc­cess work­ing with Perl, PHP, Javascript and a slew of other web scripts. It was only a mat­ter of invest­ing the time to learn how it worked and apply­ing this knowl­edge accordingly.

Flash for­ward to May of 2004 when Dou­glas “Wired” Bow­man and Adap­tive Path announce the unveil­ing of the redesigned Blog­ger (I almost spelled blooger). To put it lightly and quite hon­estly I am floored by the re-coding and design tweak­age that Bow­man and team have accomplished.

In fact I dusted off my Blog­ger accounts and I’m happy to report that it’s fun again to work with Blog­ger, much as it was years ago.

The fresh and invit­ing design makes me want to explore it fur­ther despite its lim­i­ta­tions. Unlike MT it doesn’t sup­port plug-ins but uti­liz­ing Blog­ger code you can just as eas­ily change the tem­plates to your lik­ing or use the 25+ new tem­plates cre­ated by none other than Dave Shea, Jef­frey Zeld­man, Dan Ceder­holm and others.

Thank you Google for breath­ing new life into Blogger.